In Germany, it's written all the way into the Constitution. The very first article reads (in official translation), "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." The second article, about personal development, specifically limits it to development that doesn't contradict the previous part.
That doesn't make the definitions any more concrete, but it does suggest that it's a country which takes it seriously, and the requirement pervades the rest of the national law. I don't know if that can be adopted into a country like the US, where a great many people want their First Amendment rights to trump everything else. I can even see the case for it. It's just that I hear it defended most vocally by people who aren't in a position to be harassed and don't see the way it can interfere with the rest of their lives.
They say that, but I don't believe it. The FairTax still needs to be computed, since some transactions are subject to it, and others aren't. The "prebate" system is begging to be gamed.
It seems to me that they're comparing an existing system which has decades of accumulated cruft to a brand new one which will accumulate equal amounts of cruft. I'm all for sweeping out the existing system just to reset the cruft counter to zero, but there's nothing special about the FairTax that achieves that. Nor does it particularly explain how they're going to deal with the unfairnesses that come from removing deductions that people counted on to make long-term purchasing decisions. That's a problem any new simplified tax code would have to deal with, but the FairTax doesn't even make for a clear way to phase things out because of the shift from income to consumption as a basis.
Mostly, though, I think it's disingenuous of them to claim benefits that could apply equally well to any new tax code, and to claim that the cost will be zero when that's clearly not the case.
The "FairTax" isn't an income tax, but a sales tax. That's how it gets around the complexities of determining income.
And replaces them by the difficulties of determining a "sale". Stock sales aren't sales, for example. Neither are business-to-business sales. Only end consumer consumption is a "sale". (And it introduces vast new ranges of fraud. "Oh, we didn't eat that food. It was purchased by The Jones Household, Inc, which is a corporation and therefore not subject to tax.)
Making a progressive sales tax is harder than making a progressive income tax, because it's collected by each merchant, and there's no single record of how much you've paid so far. And the sales tax is very regressive, since poor people spend all of their money, while the wealthy make "investments". (Buying a house is a sale; buying a factory is an investment.) They combat the obvious regressiveness of it with a "prebate", a kind of guaranteed poverty-line income. (And a whole new realm of opportunities for fraud.) That means that the poor pay less. And the wealthy pay less. So to take in the same total revenue, the tax on the middle class goes up.
There are reasons to do a consumption-side tax, and it can be implemented more or less coherently with a value-added tax rather than a sales tax. (You set money aside every time you receive it, and pay it every time you spend. The net effect is that if you buy something and sell it at a higher price, the net tax is only on the profit. It applies on every single transaction, which is a lot of overhead but it eliminates a lot of meaningless distinctions.) It's still regressive, which can be fixed by a progressive income tax on high-dollar earners. I suspect that's what Gates is calling for. It's very different from the FairTax.
There are problems with that as well; there's problems with any tax system. But it's not the obvious attempt to shift the burden to the middle class, as the FairTax is.
Exactly. The FairTax is highly regressive, because it taxes spending. The poor spend all of their income; the wealthy don't. It tries to make that less obvious with its "prebate", sort of a guaranteed minimum income, which removes some of the burden from those below the poverty line.
If the burden isn't on the poor and it's not on the wealthy then it *must* rest on the middle class. Proponents seem to want to play a shell game, but the fact is that if you want to remain revenue neutral, somebody is paying. And if it's not revenue-neutral, then the deficit must go up, because shifting the income side doesn't change the spending side.
The thing I find most distressing is that it's not the tax brackets that make taxes difficult. Computing the brackets is simple arithmetic. The difficulty comes in computing what counts as income, what we want to exempt, and the myriad tax breaks we use to nudge the economy. It would be easy enough to design a progressive income tax that doesn't have all of those features, and it would be at least as simple as the FairTax (without its ludicrous and fraud-prone "prebate"). But of course they're not really about simplicity. They're really about shifting the burden away from the rich.
OK, thank you. THAT is news. But that's wasn't the spin most sources seem to be putting on the article; they seemed mostly interested in rehashing the old news.
I heard frequently during the war itself that we HAD found chemical weapons, mostly from pro-war proponents. I gather that it was talked about all the time on Fox News and right-wing talk radio.
And the reply, even at the time, was that these were weapons from the first Gulf War, mostly inoperable or unreliable due to age, and likely forgotten about. They weren't part of an ongoing production effort, which is what we'd been told. There was widespread support for the war, at the beginning, based on that, which faded as we realized that the danger had been badly overstated.
So I'm trying to figure out what's new here. I had the impression that this was well known. Is it that it wasn't more widely, discussed because the Pentagon wanted it not to be?
That's OK, you also misspelled "exaggerating", so I didn't notice;-)
Mostly, yeah, it's pretty exaggerated as AI. It's potentially an interesting piece of work, but I always get skeptical when the PR departments feel they have to exaggerate.
Why is it so fucking hard to get a team of reputable people, using a well designed experiment, test this thing?
Because he won't let them. He selects the team. That's why you get the snark and arrogance from the other side: the secrecy and vagueness are strongly indicative of a hoax. Not proof, but it would be so very easy to disprove the hoax, and he's conspicuously not allowing that.
That's correct, and I'd really like to see somebody actually test Munroe's theory. I don't think that "correct horse battery staple" is any more memorable than any other password with an equivalent entropy. It's easy to remember that one because it's that-ONE. If you have a different password at each of hundreds of sites, it seems to me you won't do any better at remember which combination goes with this site. There will be hundreds of words running around in your head.
The visual might help you keep the set of 4 of them together, but will you really be able to remember which ones you used when you established that password months or even years ago? Perhaps if you modify the technique to incorporate the site that the password goes to...
It seems like something that should be testable. Are CHBS-based passwords any more memorable than any other technique? They are more brute-force resistant than shorter passwords, but if web sites are allowing brute-force attacks then something is deeply wrong to start with. That's what this article is about: CHBS generates great passwords but it may not be solving the right problem.
I find the whole notion of "secret questions" baffling. It's generally stuff that can be looked up. That reduces the security on the account, with the bonus that it has a chance of locking me out if I can't remember precisely the capitalization or punctuation I used, or which of my pets was my favorite.
I wouldn't have thought so. One could even deny that what they were doing was vigilantism. In this case he never used the word "vigilante" so I'd have said that he's explicitly NOT a "self-proclaimed vigilante". He was so proclaimed by a Slashdotter upthread.
He's certainly self-appointed, and vigilantes are by definition self-appointed, but that's different. (It's also not the same as saying that he's necessarily a vigilante, and the term doesn't exactly fit, but it's not entirely wrong, either.)
I suspect the AC doesn't care much about Bishop Ussher, nor about theism in general, but according to a recent Gallup poll 42% of Americans agree with Ussher's conclusion.
That's a lot of people. People who deserve to have their feelings hurt, because they believe something stupid. Ussher was merely wrong; they are being stupid.
Not everybody proceeds to generalize that to every religious believer. That would be similarly stupid, an obvious fallacy. But the young-earth creationists are nearly a majority of Americans, and a prominently pushy bunch attempting to have their long-disproven dogma treated as fact. They deserve to have their feelings hurt 10,000 times, and more, until they stop doing it.
The answer, of course, is "money". People will go see this. Or if they don't, it's because they did a bad job of following the formulas. The summer blockbuster formula has worked out pretty well. People like watching stuff blow up, even if they could have predicted what would blow up and what it would look like before they paid $13 for a ticket.
Battleship took in $300,000,000. It cost $200,000,000 to make. That's "why". People recognized the name, and hoped to combine their love of stuff blowing up with their fond memories of a game they used to play. They get a little charge out of the connections. It's worth $13 and two hours of their time.
I could see this doing equally well. I can't say if it's the best use of the studio's quarter-billion-dollar investment, though it should be a reasonable one. It's more likely than some unknown script, which even if people really like it stands a very small chance of making more than $300 million without the extra name recognition.
I probably won't be seeing it. Maybe I will; I saw the Lego movie, and it was pretty good (though I paid no more than my Netflix monthly subscription fee for it). I'd rather see them spend their money on something with a bit more merit, but that's just me.
I'm not sure you can save anything with a dumb TV any more. These features are so cheap that they're being replicated by a $25 stick. Adding at least basic "smart" features is kind of a no-brainer for the manufacturer.
Too bad they suck at it. At least, in my experience: the built-in version of Netflix on my TV is so bad that I bought a Roku. It's a few years old, and maybe they've improved it since then, but on mine it's slow and awkward. Perhaps in the future they'll just spend $25 and wire in one of these things.
Now they've gone back to trying to just blow the plane up. It's not impossible to get explosives past security, but they've resorted to complex ways to hide them, and they seem to suck at it. They get derogatory names like the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber because they failed.
Their incompetence suggests that they were individuals rather than concerted efforts, as the 9/11 hijackers were. Those were coordinated attacks on multiple targets, and a fair bit of effort was put into training them. It's certainly clear that they won't be able to get control of the cockpit any more, even if they threaten to kill the passengers.
That change alone probably accounts for the lack of hijackings, though having to risk passing through even theater security also means the chance of capture, and thus potentially turning into an intelligence bonanza. So the core of al Qaeda seems to have given up, and instead of unaffiliated nuts going to Cuba we get unaffiliated nuts trying to blow things up.
There is a lot of abysmal news reporting, and I encourage people to stop getting their science news from any source that wants to use it to entice you to come every single day. If the lack something exciting (which is most days), they'll exaggerate something that they hope will keep you coming back.
Fox News adds a layer of ideology onto that which makes it even worse. They go past exaggeration and attention-whoring to outright lies and distortions, on a regular and consistent basis. Most of the hyerbole in regular science reporting has little effect one way or the other, except to skew people's perception of science as either more exciting than it really is or disillusionment when supposed breakthroughs never turn into products. But Fox News lies in a way designed to produce a specific political end, in a way that has made serious consideration of certain topics nearly impossible.
I don't like any of their competitors, either, and recommend everybody shut all of them off in favor of more thoughtful (and less frequent) news sources, especially for science. They're not the only ones with a political agenda, for that matter. But I've got an extra vituperation for the network most obviously distorting science news in a form that goes past breathless exaggeration into outright lies.
I applaud your approach, but I did want to point out that a good $300 car is difficult to find (not to mention that $300 in the 1990s is about $600 today, after inflation, and minimum wage hasn't risen to match). A car in that price range is often going to be unreliable, and a single repair on something significant (transmission, engine, etc) is going to cost as much as the car. Even a new set of tires can be a significant cost burden.
If you're capable of doing your own maintenance, that can bring costs down a lot. Maintenance costs have fallen as cars have gotten more reliable, but significant repairs are getting harder. Worse, most consumers aren't in a position to evaluate which sub-$1k cars are actually worth the price, and which need thousands of dollars in repairs to be driveable. If you don't have that expertise, you need to hire somebody, at still more cost.
Which is to say: being poor is expensive. There are definitely ways to economize, and some people are bad at that. But even those who do live economically require a certain amount of luck to scrape by at the lowest income levels. Reversals, including a $300 car that turned out to be a poor bargain, can easily tip the balance for even the wise consumers.
With the economy overall recovering since then, one would expect CO2 levels to go back to rising. It's interesting that they haven't.
I can take a guess at factors: continued outsourcing of manufacturing to China, increasing prevalence of low-energy home appliances, more fuel-efficient cars, a shift to natural gas, the misleading nature of many economic figures, reduce consumerism in the middle class. There are certainly more factors. I'd be curious to know which is responsible, and how much.
To me, the real lede is buried pretty deeply in the article. The light on that particular photo IS anomalous. It sounds as if the conspiracy theorists were right about that, and that's kind of astute.
What's interesting is the resolution of the anomaly: it's light reflected off Neil Armstrong himself. Or rather, his large, bright-white suit. The NVidia guys showed that it reflects enough light to account for the lighting in the picture. If you don't include it, the lighting is off. I think that's pretty cool.
This doesn't, of course, settle anything for the conspiracy nuts, and I fully expect this to prove only that the NASA guys were wily bastards. And that sucks, because it sounds as if the brain power they're applying might well have turned up something more interesting if it weren't fixated on achieving a delusional result.
I've made my peace with future generations about my apathy. In part that's because I have no children, and don't want them; in fact, a (tiny) part of the reason I have none is that I don't want the burden of the fact that I don't believe I can contribute to a fix to this problem.
I am sorry, future generations, but the enemy was too big to move. Most of the world understood, but crucial people in crucial positions were happy to leave you a worse world, and let you deal with it. They found an awful lot of common cause with a large group of self-centered, gullible people who were easily led to believe anything that meant that they could live any way they wanted with no repercussions. No reasoning could dislodge them from that, and emotional appeals were met with contempt. It was clear that I couldn't win, and that by the time it became obvious that something had to be done, it would be much too late. It is, I suspect, already too late.
I really appreciate that you're not taking the coward's way out, as I am. Maybe you can do something I should be doing. But I simply can't justify anything but apathy. I've tried.
I completely agree... and yet there is one prominent counterexample: Wikipedia. When Wikipedia came out I was absolutely certain it would not work. And yet, somehow, it does. There are trolls, and controversial pages have to be locked down, but overall the site does astonishingly well. It's the go-to source for general information on the Internet, at least as good (and in many ways better) than expensive curated sources.
I don't completely understand what it is that makes Wikipedia work. I'm sure it's a lot of things, and at least some of the things also contribute to dysfunction (like deletionist moderators). I don't know if that can be adapted to review sites, which are at core about opinion, while Wikipedia's guiding principle of objectivity gives it a touchstone that all non-trolls more or less agree on.
The trolls don't, of course, but somehow the fact that the non-trolls outnumber the trolls makes them relatively easy to spot and manage, though there are still problems. Especially in out-of-the-way places, which is the other difficulty with review: most places will get relatively few reviews and won't have millions of eyeballs on the lookout for trolling.
Still... the reason I brought this up is that somehow, Wikipedia works, and I would have sworn it wouldn't. So maybe, just maybe, there's some hope for review sites as collaborations. It won't be as simple as reverting the many different kinds of bad reviews (from outright trolling to "I hate spicy food so you shouldn't go to this Mexican restaurant"), but I'm uncharacteristically optimistic that there might be a route forward. (I'm certain, though, that Yelp hasn't found it.)
Slashdot Mirror
In Germany, it's written all the way into the Constitution. The very first article reads (in official translation), "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." The second article, about personal development, specifically limits it to development that doesn't contradict the previous part.
That doesn't make the definitions any more concrete, but it does suggest that it's a country which takes it seriously, and the requirement pervades the rest of the national law. I don't know if that can be adopted into a country like the US, where a great many people want their First Amendment rights to trump everything else. I can even see the case for it. It's just that I hear it defended most vocally by people who aren't in a position to be harassed and don't see the way it can interfere with the rest of their lives.
They say that, but I don't believe it. The FairTax still needs to be computed, since some transactions are subject to it, and others aren't. The "prebate" system is begging to be gamed.
It seems to me that they're comparing an existing system which has decades of accumulated cruft to a brand new one which will accumulate equal amounts of cruft. I'm all for sweeping out the existing system just to reset the cruft counter to zero, but there's nothing special about the FairTax that achieves that. Nor does it particularly explain how they're going to deal with the unfairnesses that come from removing deductions that people counted on to make long-term purchasing decisions. That's a problem any new simplified tax code would have to deal with, but the FairTax doesn't even make for a clear way to phase things out because of the shift from income to consumption as a basis.
Mostly, though, I think it's disingenuous of them to claim benefits that could apply equally well to any new tax code, and to claim that the cost will be zero when that's clearly not the case.
The "FairTax" isn't an income tax, but a sales tax. That's how it gets around the complexities of determining income.
And replaces them by the difficulties of determining a "sale". Stock sales aren't sales, for example. Neither are business-to-business sales. Only end consumer consumption is a "sale". (And it introduces vast new ranges of fraud. "Oh, we didn't eat that food. It was purchased by The Jones Household, Inc, which is a corporation and therefore not subject to tax.)
Making a progressive sales tax is harder than making a progressive income tax, because it's collected by each merchant, and there's no single record of how much you've paid so far. And the sales tax is very regressive, since poor people spend all of their money, while the wealthy make "investments". (Buying a house is a sale; buying a factory is an investment.) They combat the obvious regressiveness of it with a "prebate", a kind of guaranteed poverty-line income. (And a whole new realm of opportunities for fraud.) That means that the poor pay less. And the wealthy pay less. So to take in the same total revenue, the tax on the middle class goes up.
There are reasons to do a consumption-side tax, and it can be implemented more or less coherently with a value-added tax rather than a sales tax. (You set money aside every time you receive it, and pay it every time you spend. The net effect is that if you buy something and sell it at a higher price, the net tax is only on the profit. It applies on every single transaction, which is a lot of overhead but it eliminates a lot of meaningless distinctions.) It's still regressive, which can be fixed by a progressive income tax on high-dollar earners. I suspect that's what Gates is calling for. It's very different from the FairTax.
There are problems with that as well; there's problems with any tax system. But it's not the obvious attempt to shift the burden to the middle class, as the FairTax is.
Exactly. The FairTax is highly regressive, because it taxes spending. The poor spend all of their income; the wealthy don't. It tries to make that less obvious with its "prebate", sort of a guaranteed minimum income, which removes some of the burden from those below the poverty line.
If the burden isn't on the poor and it's not on the wealthy then it *must* rest on the middle class. Proponents seem to want to play a shell game, but the fact is that if you want to remain revenue neutral, somebody is paying. And if it's not revenue-neutral, then the deficit must go up, because shifting the income side doesn't change the spending side.
The thing I find most distressing is that it's not the tax brackets that make taxes difficult. Computing the brackets is simple arithmetic. The difficulty comes in computing what counts as income, what we want to exempt, and the myriad tax breaks we use to nudge the economy. It would be easy enough to design a progressive income tax that doesn't have all of those features, and it would be at least as simple as the FairTax (without its ludicrous and fraud-prone "prebate"). But of course they're not really about simplicity. They're really about shifting the burden away from the rich.
OK, thank you. THAT is news. But that's wasn't the spin most sources seem to be putting on the article; they seemed mostly interested in rehashing the old news.
I heard frequently during the war itself that we HAD found chemical weapons, mostly from pro-war proponents. I gather that it was talked about all the time on Fox News and right-wing talk radio.
And the reply, even at the time, was that these were weapons from the first Gulf War, mostly inoperable or unreliable due to age, and likely forgotten about. They weren't part of an ongoing production effort, which is what we'd been told. There was widespread support for the war, at the beginning, based on that, which faded as we realized that the danger had been badly overstated.
So I'm trying to figure out what's new here. I had the impression that this was well known. Is it that it wasn't more widely, discussed because the Pentagon wanted it not to be?
Can't the dam guys just let the water go without having it go past the turbines?
That's OK, you also misspelled "exaggerating", so I didn't notice ;-)
Mostly, yeah, it's pretty exaggerated as AI. It's potentially an interesting piece of work, but I always get skeptical when the PR departments feel they have to exaggerate.
Holding a 36 pound tool at arm's length is gonna tire even you out, grandpa.
Thanks. Cripes, would it have been so hard to define it in TFS?
Why is it so fucking hard to get a team of reputable people, using a well designed experiment, test this thing?
Because he won't let them. He selects the team. That's why you get the snark and arrogance from the other side: the secrecy and vagueness are strongly indicative of a hoax. Not proof, but it would be so very easy to disprove the hoax, and he's conspicuously not allowing that.
That's correct, and I'd really like to see somebody actually test Munroe's theory. I don't think that "correct horse battery staple" is any more memorable than any other password with an equivalent entropy. It's easy to remember that one because it's that-ONE. If you have a different password at each of hundreds of sites, it seems to me you won't do any better at remember which combination goes with this site. There will be hundreds of words running around in your head.
The visual might help you keep the set of 4 of them together, but will you really be able to remember which ones you used when you established that password months or even years ago? Perhaps if you modify the technique to incorporate the site that the password goes to...
It seems like something that should be testable. Are CHBS-based passwords any more memorable than any other technique? They are more brute-force resistant than shorter passwords, but if web sites are allowing brute-force attacks then something is deeply wrong to start with. That's what this article is about: CHBS generates great passwords but it may not be solving the right problem.
I find the whole notion of "secret questions" baffling. It's generally stuff that can be looked up. That reduces the security on the account, with the bonus that it has a chance of locking me out if I can't remember precisely the capitalization or punctuation I used, or which of my pets was my favorite.
I wouldn't have thought so. One could even deny that what they were doing was vigilantism. In this case he never used the word "vigilante" so I'd have said that he's explicitly NOT a "self-proclaimed vigilante". He was so proclaimed by a Slashdotter upthread.
He's certainly self-appointed, and vigilantes are by definition self-appointed, but that's different. (It's also not the same as saying that he's necessarily a vigilante, and the term doesn't exactly fit, but it's not entirely wrong, either.)
I suspect the AC doesn't care much about Bishop Ussher, nor about theism in general, but according to a recent Gallup poll 42% of Americans agree with Ussher's conclusion.
That's a lot of people. People who deserve to have their feelings hurt, because they believe something stupid. Ussher was merely wrong; they are being stupid.
Not everybody proceeds to generalize that to every religious believer. That would be similarly stupid, an obvious fallacy. But the young-earth creationists are nearly a majority of Americans, and a prominently pushy bunch attempting to have their long-disproven dogma treated as fact. They deserve to have their feelings hurt 10,000 times, and more, until they stop doing it.
The answer, of course, is "money". People will go see this. Or if they don't, it's because they did a bad job of following the formulas. The summer blockbuster formula has worked out pretty well. People like watching stuff blow up, even if they could have predicted what would blow up and what it would look like before they paid $13 for a ticket.
Battleship took in $300,000,000. It cost $200,000,000 to make. That's "why". People recognized the name, and hoped to combine their love of stuff blowing up with their fond memories of a game they used to play. They get a little charge out of the connections. It's worth $13 and two hours of their time.
I could see this doing equally well. I can't say if it's the best use of the studio's quarter-billion-dollar investment, though it should be a reasonable one. It's more likely than some unknown script, which even if people really like it stands a very small chance of making more than $300 million without the extra name recognition.
I probably won't be seeing it. Maybe I will; I saw the Lego movie, and it was pretty good (though I paid no more than my Netflix monthly subscription fee for it). I'd rather see them spend their money on something with a bit more merit, but that's just me.
I'm not sure you can save anything with a dumb TV any more. These features are so cheap that they're being replicated by a $25 stick. Adding at least basic "smart" features is kind of a no-brainer for the manufacturer.
Too bad they suck at it. At least, in my experience: the built-in version of Netflix on my TV is so bad that I bought a Roku. It's a few years old, and maybe they've improved it since then, but on mine it's slow and awkward. Perhaps in the future they'll just spend $25 and wire in one of these things.
Now they've gone back to trying to just blow the plane up. It's not impossible to get explosives past security, but they've resorted to complex ways to hide them, and they seem to suck at it. They get derogatory names like the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber because they failed.
Their incompetence suggests that they were individuals rather than concerted efforts, as the 9/11 hijackers were. Those were coordinated attacks on multiple targets, and a fair bit of effort was put into training them. It's certainly clear that they won't be able to get control of the cockpit any more, even if they threaten to kill the passengers.
That change alone probably accounts for the lack of hijackings, though having to risk passing through even theater security also means the chance of capture, and thus potentially turning into an intelligence bonanza. So the core of al Qaeda seems to have given up, and instead of unaffiliated nuts going to Cuba we get unaffiliated nuts trying to blow things up.
There is a lot of abysmal news reporting, and I encourage people to stop getting their science news from any source that wants to use it to entice you to come every single day. If the lack something exciting (which is most days), they'll exaggerate something that they hope will keep you coming back.
Fox News adds a layer of ideology onto that which makes it even worse. They go past exaggeration and attention-whoring to outright lies and distortions, on a regular and consistent basis. Most of the hyerbole in regular science reporting has little effect one way or the other, except to skew people's perception of science as either more exciting than it really is or disillusionment when supposed breakthroughs never turn into products. But Fox News lies in a way designed to produce a specific political end, in a way that has made serious consideration of certain topics nearly impossible.
I don't like any of their competitors, either, and recommend everybody shut all of them off in favor of more thoughtful (and less frequent) news sources, especially for science. They're not the only ones with a political agenda, for that matter. But I've got an extra vituperation for the network most obviously distorting science news in a form that goes past breathless exaggeration into outright lies.
I applaud your approach, but I did want to point out that a good $300 car is difficult to find (not to mention that $300 in the 1990s is about $600 today, after inflation, and minimum wage hasn't risen to match). A car in that price range is often going to be unreliable, and a single repair on something significant (transmission, engine, etc) is going to cost as much as the car. Even a new set of tires can be a significant cost burden.
If you're capable of doing your own maintenance, that can bring costs down a lot. Maintenance costs have fallen as cars have gotten more reliable, but significant repairs are getting harder. Worse, most consumers aren't in a position to evaluate which sub-$1k cars are actually worth the price, and which need thousands of dollars in repairs to be driveable. If you don't have that expertise, you need to hire somebody, at still more cost.
Which is to say: being poor is expensive. There are definitely ways to economize, and some people are bad at that. But even those who do live economically require a certain amount of luck to scrape by at the lowest income levels. Reversals, including a $300 car that turned out to be a poor bargain, can easily tip the balance for even the wise consumers.
With the economy overall recovering since then, one would expect CO2 levels to go back to rising. It's interesting that they haven't.
I can take a guess at factors: continued outsourcing of manufacturing to China, increasing prevalence of low-energy home appliances, more fuel-efficient cars, a shift to natural gas, the misleading nature of many economic figures, reduce consumerism in the middle class. There are certainly more factors. I'd be curious to know which is responsible, and how much.
If you need more than that, you'd probably use some tedious-to-type ultra secure battery horse staple thing anyway.
Correct!
To me, the real lede is buried pretty deeply in the article. The light on that particular photo IS anomalous. It sounds as if the conspiracy theorists were right about that, and that's kind of astute.
What's interesting is the resolution of the anomaly: it's light reflected off Neil Armstrong himself. Or rather, his large, bright-white suit. The NVidia guys showed that it reflects enough light to account for the lighting in the picture. If you don't include it, the lighting is off. I think that's pretty cool.
This doesn't, of course, settle anything for the conspiracy nuts, and I fully expect this to prove only that the NASA guys were wily bastards. And that sucks, because it sounds as if the brain power they're applying might well have turned up something more interesting if it weren't fixated on achieving a delusional result.
Thank you for caring. Seriously.
I've made my peace with future generations about my apathy. In part that's because I have no children, and don't want them; in fact, a (tiny) part of the reason I have none is that I don't want the burden of the fact that I don't believe I can contribute to a fix to this problem.
I am sorry, future generations, but the enemy was too big to move. Most of the world understood, but crucial people in crucial positions were happy to leave you a worse world, and let you deal with it. They found an awful lot of common cause with a large group of self-centered, gullible people who were easily led to believe anything that meant that they could live any way they wanted with no repercussions. No reasoning could dislodge them from that, and emotional appeals were met with contempt. It was clear that I couldn't win, and that by the time it became obvious that something had to be done, it would be much too late. It is, I suspect, already too late.
I really appreciate that you're not taking the coward's way out, as I am. Maybe you can do something I should be doing. But I simply can't justify anything but apathy. I've tried.
I completely agree... and yet there is one prominent counterexample: Wikipedia. When Wikipedia came out I was absolutely certain it would not work. And yet, somehow, it does. There are trolls, and controversial pages have to be locked down, but overall the site does astonishingly well. It's the go-to source for general information on the Internet, at least as good (and in many ways better) than expensive curated sources.
I don't completely understand what it is that makes Wikipedia work. I'm sure it's a lot of things, and at least some of the things also contribute to dysfunction (like deletionist moderators). I don't know if that can be adapted to review sites, which are at core about opinion, while Wikipedia's guiding principle of objectivity gives it a touchstone that all non-trolls more or less agree on.
The trolls don't, of course, but somehow the fact that the non-trolls outnumber the trolls makes them relatively easy to spot and manage, though there are still problems. Especially in out-of-the-way places, which is the other difficulty with review: most places will get relatively few reviews and won't have millions of eyeballs on the lookout for trolling.
Still... the reason I brought this up is that somehow, Wikipedia works, and I would have sworn it wouldn't. So maybe, just maybe, there's some hope for review sites as collaborations. It won't be as simple as reverting the many different kinds of bad reviews (from outright trolling to "I hate spicy food so you shouldn't go to this Mexican restaurant"), but I'm uncharacteristically optimistic that there might be a route forward. (I'm certain, though, that Yelp hasn't found it.)